To Arms
by theleonhearted
Summary: When Sif invades his thoughts, the exiled Loki calls upon his soldiers. {Loki/Clone, implied Loki/Sif}


**Author's Note: **Loki/Clone selfcest abounds. A result of a plot bunny I've had for awhile now.

On an unrelated note, I'm publishing this on my birthday. Yay?

**Disclaimer:** I still, _still_ don't own _Thor_. If I did, I'd make Kenneth Brannagh direct the new movie.

* * *

Loki stood at the edge of the world. The night ripped a plot of new death as it spread, a desert of ice and cold. From his perch within this stricken paradise, Loki could see sky: choked by clouds and not human filth. The end of this land would be like drunken waters.

He had seen the high and rushing seas, the forests of concrete and steel. Castles, prisons, a city of angels filled with devilry. Loki waited on this Earth, his homestead in exile, and prepared for war. Midgard's heart swelled within him. Soon, his soldiers would be ready.

On some nights, stars burst from the sky. On others, a thick band of colored light danced above Earth's sleeping mountains. This world was tawdry, undirected. Loki would rule it and splendidly.

Snow fell, too, in Midgard. The world howled, begging for his hand. It _wanted. _The great life-star shielded itself from Loki, cursed, a cage of light-washed ice and shame. Still, he discovered flowers that withstood the storms: tough-stemmed and fiercely red. Loki discovered and forgot them, because Loki turned from them always, moving on through a wind that sighed and sighed, his palms burned from frost and from where he'd dug his nails into the flesh to bleed.

Some nights, Loki thought of what he'd left behind.

On these nights he retreated to his haven, a disposable shelter among many, hidden among a range of mountains where the clouds above gathered deeply and shed pale tears. A shelter kept for rest. For indulgence.

The servants Loki summoned wore his face. The clones shared his body and extended from his mind; they were fed by Loki's magic, guided by his thoughts. They knew his mood by tasting, the bitter of thoughtforms—patterns of action, slow-forming routine. Now Loki called his self-made partner, a ghost in darkness that wore his clothes—a different sort of soldier. Ready, always.

Loki's lesser form knelt before its master, a willing body bathed in light: god's eyes, candle flame, the sickly orb glowing in the sky. Its hair fell slyly over a pale and hungry face. Waiting.

_"_You will not speak words," Loki commanded, though it wasn't needed. He touched the cheek of his creation, and it arched for him like a bow. They sank into his little bed, ungraceful - and Loki listened, a hundred hundred life-beats echoing in the clone's false heart. Above them, around them, the clouds wept.

She stood before him, as always, in darkness. Her lips formed pale shapes of sounds, a declaration of war—_flowers, fire, the end of all things - _her grin edged his nerves, merciless—_and I will bring you to your knees—_she bore her body to him, smiling, smiling, he could nearly taste—

"Sif." Just her name; then a naked hand at the clone's collarbone, the sleek bowl of Midgard's moon reflected in chrome. A long, long breath, and a memory. "Remove your longcoat."

The clothing fell away in pieces, coats and boots, thin fabric shed by Loki's fingers. He cloaked their bodies in blankets, slick-warm against the flush of skin. He regarded his double with clouded eyes, this creature born of raw desire, this body which would submit itself to Loki without knives or claws or teeth, like a dream—

Loki kissed himself, his mouth hard, his tongue inside; and he tasted the smoke of her under his mouth, ashes and dust, ambrosia. He scraped a bite into the copy's lips, and it coiled itself around him—and that, that was the gesture that brought Loki to mercy.

Sif's body was a snake, strong and unyielding, whitewhitewhite in memory. Loki kissed his partner's lips; he bit them, open-mouthed and sloppy, and tasted gold. The clone's nails grazed Loki's cock, knowing: knowing that Loki would seek carnage, that he would expect pain and command bruises—_(It should be a simple matter, now.)_

Sif's lips were ragged and rough. Sif's lips tasted of iron.

Fingers came, as always. They grasped Loki's hair, scratched at his ribs, glided against his cock. They pulled and pushed and satisfied, and Loki did not scream simply for the displeasure of it all.

Loki's copy pinned him down, too-smooth fingers pressing new purpled, damning marks: reminders of what had been lost. Its hair traced over Loki's chest _(nothing, nothing, it smells like mischief and moonlight)_; then quick quick nails, pointed fingers, sharp lips seeking his throat, shoulder, the curve of a hip. Loki growled and Loki guttered, cock flushed against his ashen stomach. The clone moved fluidly, forgivable and wrong.

"Harsher," Loki hissed, grasping the knobbed wrist of his copy. It obeyed, clawing Loki's chest and bitting hard at the nipples, a trail of steady fire. Loki pressed magic into its spine, a spell to change the body, and one that even he found difficult to achieve. The copies never managed to take her form; not completely.

They kissed again, a slow burn. Loki saw Sif in the hot-glare of his own eyes, felt her strangle their bodies in his blankets. He tasted the blood on her lips, the red she painted onto his ribs: art, a knife, and nights made longer with each breath.

These nights the sights beneath the ceiling were stained green-gold and dark, and Loki's partners were wantful shadows that sprang from firelight. Loki gripped the shoulders of his clone, and loathed his power over it—his rulership of something so base as this mewling creature who even now pleasured him with its hands.

Even this moment was stolen from time; even this breath belonged to him.

All of it was wrong.

Loki craved the discomposure. Loki reveled in the thick of their war. The moments in which she spilled into him like a drowned illusion, his tongue between her legs—before these, Loki had thought mischief to be his favorite thing in the worlds.

_"Sif—"_

He made a little noise, a high and keening sound, when the double took Loki's cock into its mouth. It coiled its tongue in languid strokes, pressed frost-breath kisses onto the tip. Sif's lips would seal him like a death, redder than blood. _See how the shadow-prince trembles._ Loki closed his eyes and thought of love.

He nearly heard Sif laugh. _(Love is drowsy, like wintering _worms_. It steals the hearts of warriors and reduces them to mash.)_

"You curse sentiment, but oh—" sudden words, dry whispers to the clone's neck, and Loki drinking its sighs— "oh, how you sing for me." _(Perhaps you would form a truce with this drowsiness, some day.)_

Loki pulled his partner to him. He brought his lips to the clone's throat, planted bruises that would bloom like bird's wings and last and last. Kisses forged with teeth and not lips. The dampened skin beneath his tongue tasted of something empty and longing. Their bodies meshed, the pieces fitting together like secrets.

"You cannot survive even this night before offering your neck to my lips, for all your words—Sif!"

_(Not I. Not I.)_

He knew his own shape far less than he did hers. The double twisted and writhed and exhaled into Loki's mouth; it did so noiselessly. His magic worked slowly and irregularly: small changes, lengthening hair and a curving waist. Silence, silence. He couldn't remember the sound of her sighs.

What he did remember was how Sif came to him in a ravenous mood and fucked Loki into his imperial sheets, pinned his wrists and sank herself down, gnashing her killer's teeth. Loki filled his hands with her, a siren, a flame. In darkness they became gold, and Loki could break her with his hands. She was beautiful when she screamed.

"You'll scream for no other man. Only for me, with your devil's tongue." _(Give me cause to scream, then.)_

He thought he might see her when he opened his eyes, something savage and pure; he thought he might taste the salt of her skin. The clone's hair was too dark still, too thin. He snaked a hand around its throat, a crude decoration.

In his dreams Loki forced her down with his body. In his dreams Loki forced her submission, and Sif laughed and laughed. He could never force the laughter away.

The shadow-clone did not laugh. It opened itself to Loki like a flower; but there was no challenge, no game, no war of attrition to be staged and lost. To defeat Sif was never Loki's objective; merely to bring her to ruin, a ruin to fill her mouth and consume her body. A ruin to return her, night after night, to him.

Loki closed his eyes and kissed her. He kissed her with his lips, held her face in his hands. He marred her with his tongue, in all the places that caused her to choke her screams. He magicked his mischief into her mind.

_(Loki —)_

What they'd possessed was not a relationship, but a battle. They'd clashed and crashed and stuck to one another, not seamlessly but sharp-edged and fragmented and perfect. She made war, she was war, a storm, a feather. The edge of light. _Sif_.

_(Loki, Loki —)_

Loki thrust against himself, stroked himself, tasted his lying tongue. His thighs spread back and apart, a long breath and spilled thoughts and _(nothing, nothing, oh). _He was laughing, screaming, any sounds but words, any words but her name. The clone silenced his mind with pleasure. They rutted together, a cursed and empty coupling, and Loki's orgasm left him open-mouthed with Sif rotting on his lips.

The thing stayed flush against him just enough for the static skin to bite: a paint made of his weakness, and a reminder of the painful slick that molded Loki's shape to hers. Magic stung his hands. The clone's long hair had not withered; Loki took it in his fingers and pulled and pulled.

_(Always, you marvel over my hair.) _The clone's shoulder gave a small twitch, as if it knew. It seemed slenderer, somehow.

"My hair," Loki whispered to it, and closed his eyes. "The hair my mischief gave to you."

The clone laughed, but not in Loki's voice. When he opened his eyes, the delicate-deadly body of Sif waited there, perfectly sculpted, for his validation.

Loki did not touch her. He did not move at all. Instead, he dismissed the clone and wrapped himself deeper in a cold and drowsy truce.

_(Not I. Not I.)_

The words became his lullaby; then they became his battle-cry.


End file.
